Introduction: Fighting the People’s War

Abstract

The Blitzkrieg on the United Kingdom during the Second World War was the most direct attack on civilians in British history.¹ As London and other British cities came under siege beginning in September 1940, the common cause of national defense seemed to reduce distance between soldiers and civilians, to resolve differences between men and women, and to repair divisions between leisured and working classes. Politicians and the media emphasized the unifying and leveling power of the Blitz, labeling the conflict a “People’s War” and claiming that wartime changes in gender roles and class relations might lead to postwar social reform. Most literary and historical scholarship has assumed the coherence of People’s War ideology and examined its effect upon British women and workers during and after the Blitz.² Recently, however, historians such as Angus Calder, Penny Summerfield, and Sonya Rose have begun to analyze disparities among individual accounts of the Blitz and therefore to question the assumption of a unified cultural understanding of the People’s War. British Literature of the Blitz shifts the focus of this historical discussion to the literary imagination, arguing that tensions concerning class relations and gender roles arose not only between but also within individual representations of the People’s War. The fiction, film, and personal testimonies of the Blitz emphasize the freedom to disagree with others by demonstrating the individual freedom to contradict oneself.